Almost every expert says that you can’t vote online safely. You see the opinion so often it’s become received wisdom. Yet that’s exactly what happens in Estonia. Estonians can vote from anywhere in the world and can vote as often as they like—only the last vote counts, of course. To Estonians, this only makes sense. All their interactions with the government can be performed digitally.
I’ve written about digital life in Estonia before. It is, I think, something we should all strive for. In Estonia, you don’t have to fill out the same personal information over and over again as you deal with different government agencies. And you certainly don’t have to spend hours at the DMV to renew your driver’s license. Everything is linked to a digital ID that is used to mediate all those transactions.
Of course, that sounds like it could be a dystopian nightmare. The government has all your information conveniently linked by that ID. On the other hand, things are not much better in, say, the US. The government still has all your information, it’s just spread out among many agencies. It may take a little effort but they can certainly pull together all your information when they need to. Estonia, for its part, has taken pains to protect their citizens’ data and to guarantee that it belongs to the citizen not the government.
I don’t have enough data or expertise to evaluate how well they meet that goal but Estonians seem happy with the results. It would probably be hard for any Western country to replicate what they have. They started out fresh when they Soviet Union fell and they’re a relatively small country. Still, they have a system worth emulating to the extent we can. In the US that would require ironclad constitutional guarantees of privacy and ownership of your data for a start. That would be hard and probably won’t happen but it’s a worthy goal.